about their origins; but, while extensive, they had been much smaller and far less beautiful. Thousands of years of pegasus sculptors, rubbing and smoothing and chipping and carving, using such small tools as their frail feather-hands could hold, and the Caves were—so beautiful you can’t really stay there long, you want to jump out of your skin and run for it. They’re perfect, you know, even though they’re not finished—will never be finished—it’s part of their perfection, that it goes on and on into the future and you’ll never see it, that us little short-lived mortals create perfection by not being there long, although we keep coming, us and our sons and daughters and their sons and daughters and so on.... Sorry. I’m sounding like a grown-up.
But the sculptors themselves don’t stay inside long—a few weeks or months—and then they come out and join us in the fields for a while, although they mostly don’t like to go far. “Remember how to not fly,” is the proverb: remember how to walk. They come out and join us in the fields. And teach their beginning apprentices sculpting on the pillars of the shfeeah. The Caves knock your Courts hollow, although this one’s pretty nice, he added, looking round consideringly. But it’s only barely just been built.
Sylvi, fascinated, forbore to say that the Outer Court was one of the oldest bits of the palace, over seven hundred years old.
You can see it too clearly, Ebon went on, where it begins and ends, your Court. It’s different in the Caves. The chambers and corridors all open out of each other and weave back and forth like the king’s plaits on coronation day. Very very occasionally, an old sculptor may ask for a decision to rub through a wall—the other sculptors have to agree, and the monarch and the decision-making shamans. It doesn’t happen often. And it becomes a permanent day on our calendar, the day that someone brushes the thin-made place on a wall and suddenly there’s a hole there, even if it took years to scratch open and it will be years more before the hole is big enough to climb through and see what’s on the other side. I was born on Damonay—the day three hundred and twenty-six years before that they had made a hole in Damonay chamber. Ambernia chamber, which is the one they let out of darkness, is all red stone and considered one of the most beautiful in all the Caves, so being born on Damonay is lucky.
Do humans ever go there? To your Caves?
Ebon looked at her, puzzled: head low, chin pulled in, one ear half back. Not that I know of. Humans don’t come to us. We come to you. The Caves aren’t a human sort of thing. He paused and—this was a frown, Sylvi thought: both ears half back, head raised again but held rather stiffly to one side. I ... I don’t know. They ... they wouldn’t fit around you, somehow. And it’s in the treaty that we’re supposed to come to you.
Sylvi was human enough, and princess enough, to know what that meant in human terms. Don’t you—mind? Mind always coming to us?
Ebon shrugged again—she was sure, now, that it was a pegasus shrug. What’s to mind? That we keep our quiet and our privacy? That we don’t have to worry about providing dead flesh for you to eat? And chairs? I would not be your father, the human king, to have the winning of that old war carried on my back, and on the backs of all the kings and queens after me, until the end of humans and pegasi—and the winning of any other wars. We are free, we pegasi, thanks to you. We are glad to honour you in this way if it pleases you—if it means you’ll go on carrying the burden for both of us. In what Sylvi was already learning was a typical Ebon manner, he added, Mind you, I wouldn’t want to be my dad either—he still has to listen to all the bickering when someone feels left out of some decision—and he has to listen to people like Gaaloo go on and on because usually there’s about six important words in what Gaaloo says that nobody else thinks of and since my dad’s king, he’d better hear them.
Sylvi sat up in bed. Something had moved very quickly between the window and the stars; something not only swift but large. There—there it was again, higher